Endring
Faith and bread. We provide food to fill the hungry, words to succour the sick at heart. All we do, we do for you, the people, who we love. Who we were sundered from by sovereignty's mocking lies. We are your servants, not your masters. We are the hearth where you are ever welcome home. We know what it is to be wanderers, sundered from meaning, coherency, and comfort. We will do all we can to keep it from happening to you.
– From a speech by Liria, the Seven-Named, living god of Endring.
History and Mystery: How Endring Came To Be
Endring is one of the world’s larger and more stable nations. It prides itself on having preserved an extensive web of social and cultural coherence for nearly fourteen hundred years. It has endured the twists of history because (so its priests preach) it is a state that exists for its people, not on their backs. It is a holy polity, built on endless, multi-faceted contracts between the visible and invisible worlds. Between humans and gods. The gods are many and everywhere, the whole world brimming full of unseen conscious agents. There are great gods and small ones. Some are incarnated in people: in high priests and in the wandering holy ones who emerge at intervals, like ripples in the water.
Endring was born from the pyre of revolution, in name and substance both. The empire that it rose from the ashes of claimed many things: eternal antiquity, immutable hierarchy, synonymity with the natural order. All of its detailed self-justifications and rebuttals were burned away to ash when the revolutionaries piled the state records atop great bonfires. Many Archivists today lament this loss, but the books of the old regime were filled with the taint and malice of the Trickster Gods, and the debt records that bound the people to the land. The gods came to earth, incarnate in the revolutionaries, and proved all their claims a lie. The agency of conscious actors, human and divine alike, replaced immutable, impersonal chains. The palace-temples of potentates were thrown open, refurbished as temple-factories of collective work and worship.
Before the empire, before the revolution, the land that is now named Endring was significantly culturally intertwined with the seafarers of Nemeus. Whether it was directly ruled as a Nemean colony and for how long remains debated. Echoes of the same deities, the same myths, are found in both cultures, though refracted through the shifting prism of time. Time, too, is measured in connected ways.
The Here and the Now: Daily Life in Endring
Endring is a warm peninsula, with beaches of pink sand like glittering quartz. It is bountiful in food crops, in the fish that swim in its turquoise waters, and in many of the materials needed for its exquisite craftsmanship, from precious metals and stones to textiles and potters’ clay. It is a land of terrace cafes and temples. Of winding hedgerows and shaded alleys. Of slow meals beneath endless sunsets, and work carried out to the sound of hymns.
Temples are the centres of both divine worship and organisation and industrial productivity within Endring. The incarnate gods wander between their different temples, giving advice and mingling with worshippers. All economic and political activity is seen as sacred and inspirited. Prayer is performed before any task is undertaken. Any collective activity is a sacred rite, presided over by priests. There is no secular power. All work is laden with holy meaning.
People live in interlocking nexuses of community, usually close to multiple temples. Some temples double as guildhalls for artisanal labour, some granaries for farms. They give from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. The only requirement is to believe, and work in accordance with the domains and teachings of your deity. Promotion up the temple hierarchy does not lead to any more access to food or worldly goods, but it does lead to secret knowledge, and a closer relationship with the god.
Endring’s temples enthusiastically collaborate with the Archive in its search to comprehend all knowledge. In the process, they open up constant new vistas of divine significance, new layers to the vast invisible dance. The Archive’s secularism is absurd, of course, but the typical Endringian response to that is pity, not rage. In contrast, Endring is hostile to Mayton Greynes, for its disenchanted commerce and alienation of labour. For those it allows to go without bread, even as it pretends all is well.
Those in Endring who do not find themselves able to adjust to the faith and calling of one temple can usually find another to take them in. Usually. There are exceptions. People who wander from place to place, and are usually given bread, but not allowed to stay for long. These are labelled Nameless Ones. People who lack purpose. Lack coherence. Lack a Name.
Religion
With the exception of those incarnate in the high priests, the gods exist at a communicative gulf from most mortals. Prayer and communion with them manifests ambiguously, in intense emotions and sometimes dreams. Sceptics in Mayton Greynes and the Archive (although the latter usually frame it more tactfully) often argue that these experiences and the apparent good fortune that results from them are simply a society-wide placebo effect, and that the incarnates are tricksters and liars. For their part, many of Endring’s priesthoods argue that the monarchy of Mayton Greynes, and all other monarchies world-wide, are modern manifestations of the Trickster Gods, who hide in royal blood, granting it a perverted form of divinity, with which they deceive their people.
According to Endringian teaching, everything contains a deity. However, the relations of correspondence and sympathy between the deities lead to a constant interplay of their subjectivities, to the point that they can at times be identified as single beings. This is especially true for those deities who transcend the gap between the divine and mortal worlds, and speak with mortal voice. They are usually deities of many things at once, and temples grow around them.
The mortal forms these gods inhabit do not live forever. Their successors are elected from among a pool of volunteer priests, potentially of any position in the hierarchy past novitiate. The volunteers are vigorously vetted to ensure they are in the right place to be making the decision, truly aware of the consequences. They retain consciousness and a level of autonomy, negotiating decisions with the god. It is said that past embodiments become parts of their god’s gestalt consciousness, their memories intact but their separate intentionality largely melded with the divine flow.
The Ruling Gods
Currently the six gods listed below are the most influential. All of them are known to have first incarnated before or during the Uprising, and they are associated with many different temples and domains, as well as the structure of the year. A number of Temples often overlap in the same communities, and it is very possible to be an initiate of more than one, although the highest echelons are generally more exclusive.
Players are free to create their own deities and temples. These will likely belong to 'smaller' gods, with fewer domains and smaller Temples. These smaller gods may be incarnate or non-incarnate.
| NPC | Pronouns | Description |
| Alaxus, the Saltkeeper | they/xe | Non-incarnate deity of boats, birds (but not their song), stars (but not each individual star), tunnels, secrets, delays and navigation. Among their worshippers are sailors, fisherfolk, dancers, astronomers, watercolour painters and cartographers. They're often associated with the original crossings from Nemeus. Their disparate Fisher-Temples are sometimes accused of piracy by Mayton Greynes. Xer clergy are conflicted on the question on how to interpret the historical intertwining of ancient Nemeus and ancient Endring, but generally committed to support for modern-day Nemeans. Like OBIX, Alaxus is not a god who walks the world in modern times. They are sometimes associated with crossings to the afterlife, or the world of gods. Xe is said to have embarked upon a final voyage there, and shown the way that mortals might follow; perhaps even to have torn open the first of the holes in the firmament that let the light of heaven through. Every new star discovered by astronomers is seen as presaging a new divine incarnation. |
| Itztepex, the Sting of Clarity | he/they | Incarnate deity of communication, instinct, storms, eels, debate and rhetoric. Among their worshippers are politicians, diplomats/foreign ambassadors, tutors/personal mentors and lawyers. A diplomat-god, known for his long, extemporary speeches to foreign politicians. Increasingly rumoured to have a rivalry with Liria, who sees him as too wedded to smoothing the feathers of Mayton Greynes. Itztepex is as enthusiastic about the Internet as traditional oral rhetorical performances: Lirians have taken to scornfully calling members of their temple ‘holy trolls’. He is deeply serious in playing his role of contrarian, devil’s advocate and rigorous sceptic, preaching that 'disagreement seeds the path towards deeper realisation and mutual congruence'. Their followers seek to find ‘truth in the heart of subversion’. |
| Kleiops, the Rustfather | he/they | Incarnate deity of decay, loss, mud, pottery, badgers, locks, and judgement. Among their worshippers are potters, morticians, forensic analysts, archaeologists and masons. They are known especially for their factories, where nearly-lost memories are recorded in rust-coloured clay, and baked so that, for a time (never forever), we may contemplate their apparent certainties, before they too crumble away to dust. Deeply hostile to the new technology, which they see as destroying artisanal creativity and the holy symbolic meaning inherent in all work: ‘the destruction of the beauty of labour is the Trickster Gods’ final gambit’. He is even hostile to collaboration with the Archive, seeing dangerous absurdity in their attempts to preserve memories eternally. Alaxus is understood to be Kleiops's sibling, and Kleiops's clergy have a more despairing understanding of the disappearance of Alaxus than Alaxus's do. They believe that after Alaxus parted the veil beyond this reality, Kleiops felt an immense amount of shame for allowing xer to dissipate into the aether of the endless oceans. Some say that through his pottery he seeks to make a pot large enough to scoop up the oceans and so find Alaxus again. |
| Liria, the Seven-Named | she/they | Incarnate deity of naming, writing, prayer, birdsong, book-making and printing. Among her worshippers are librarians, printers, book-makers, poets, novelists, archivists, singers, historians and philosophers. Stole the names of the Seven Smiling Tempests in a riddle game during the Uprising, and with them their power of internal coherency. Head of the resplendent Temple of Blessed Air, the wonder of Endring, where the Tempests once reigned. The central liaison between Endring and the Archive, since the disappearance of OBIX, with whom they previously shared the role. She is at the forefront of denouncing Mayton Greynes, but also arguing for the potential of its technology. Liria is a humble god (it is crucial to their mystique). She will log on to the seasonal Archive meetings to discuss the progression of knowledge, its dissemination, systematisation and protection. Their presence sends certain Archivists into extemporary prayer sessions, to the quiet irritation of the secular majority. |
| Mumnos, the Shuffling Hill | they/them | Incarnate creator deity of flowers, community, hearth, food, bees, generosity, and debt. Among their worshippers are farmers, botanists, biologists and cooks. The patron of many temple-farms and granaries. Alaxus, Kleiops and Mumnos are widely agreed to be the oldest of the incarnate gods, whatever age might mean for beings from a world outside time. Mumnos stands outside the gods’ political struggles too, arguing for the acceptance of everything: there should be no boundaries to the endless kinship of those who break bread at the hearthside.1) |
| OBIX, the Ever-Stalker | they/it | Ambiguously-incarnate deity of pursuit, luck, felines, darkness, collection, and games. Among their worshippers are hunters, scouts, archivists, gamblers and cartographers. Whispered to have briefly collaborated with the Tricksters, but to have turned on them when it recognised the unfairness of their games. Known to have a long association with Liria, from the revolution to recent times. OBIX has not been seen in some time. Some argue they are pursuing some mystery through the Archive. Others, that they have become it, melding with its endless collection of knowledge. If you feel a sentience in those halls, many Endringians will swear it is OBIX. |
Of the gods, only Liria routinely attends the Archive's forums, although Itztepex has been known to when the fancy strikes them. Nevertheless, all the incarnates are ready and willing to respond to mortal queries. Kleiops, Mumnos and Itztepex may be interacted with in emails and turnsheets, and you may try your luck with prayers to Alaxus and OBIX. Who attends uptimes may also shift, like the pink sands on the beaches. Keep your eyes open. Stay tuned.